THE ARCHIVE

He was a Hungarian writer who never flinched — not from power, violence, or the heights that unsettle others. In this book, he coolly dismantles Puskás’s accusations with surgical clarity and bone-dry wit, turning them into unintentional comedy. Moldova doesn’t sneer or lash out; he simply outthinks his critic. It’s him at his sharpest and most fearless.

Örkény’s One Minute Stories are tiny detonations: short, strange, and wickedly precise. Each piece compresses absurdity, tragedy, and dark humor into a single breath, revealing how ridiculous and fragile everyday life really is. He never moralizes — he just tilts reality a few degrees, and suddenly the world shows its seams. These micro-stories are brief, but they leave long, sharp echoes.

Rose Exhibition is one of Örkény’s most disturbing visions: a perfectly civilized crowd walks among glass cases, calmly evaluating dying people as if they were rare flowers. With icy precision he showed — nearly forty years before reality TV — how effortlessly audiences can be trained to desire suffering on a screen. It’s a grotesque parable of spectatorship, and one of Örkény’s most chilling warnings about the future.

The ultimate debugging of fate. Proof that pre-crime is just a runtime error in the timeline. A study on the architecture of inevitability.

A user manual for reality decay. When the universe itself suffers from bit rot, and only a spray can fix the entropy.

The Voight-Kampff test is the original Turing Test for the soul. A protocol to distinguish the glitch from the ghost.

The Mission is Zsoldos Péter’s cold, philosophical classic — a story where duty, survival, and identity slowly peel apart in deep space. It blends hard sci-fi with moral ambiguity: a mission that seems simple becomes a trap of shifting loyalties and uncertain reality. Zsoldos writes with quiet intensity, turning every technical detail into psychological pressure. It’s one of Hungarian science fiction’s defining works: precise, unsettling, and impossible to shake off.

Stories That End Badly is Csáth Géza at full voltage — the foremost voice of Hungarian naturalism, writing with a precision that’s both clinical and hypnotic. These tales begin like fragile fairy stories, then peel back the skin to show addiction, cruelty, and the quiet slide into madness. The prose is stomach-turningly beautiful: elegant sentences carrying horrors that feel disturbingly inevitable.

Asimov’s Robot universe is a ten-volume giant — an interlocking architecture of history, logic, and speculative ambition. It’s the blueprint of sci-fi: psychohistory, galactic politics, machine ethics, and the slow birth of a future mythology. I’ve made it through four volumes so far, and even that feels like walking through a cathedral built from pure reason. One day, I’ll return.